Arbitration within a multiport AMBA slave

Details Arbitration within a multiport AMBA slave Arbitration within a multiport AMBA slave

2002-10-01

2004-09-28

Siek, Vuthe (Department: 2825)

Computer-aided design and analysis of circuits and semiconductor

Nanotechnology related integrated circuit design

C716S030000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06799304

ABSTRACT:

FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to peripheral resource sharing generally and, more particularly, to arbitration functionability within a multiport advanced micro-controller bus architecture (AMBA) slave device.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Multiport slave peripheral circuit designs are commonly a single monolithic block within an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The monolithic block approach creates difficulties in reusing all or portions of the design since the design is customized for the original ASIC application. Where portions of the design are reused, maintenance becomes difficult where the reused blocks are modified in order to be fully integrated with other blocks in the new application.
Another limitation of the monolithic block approach is encountered where bus traffic at a particular port varies among and/or within applications. For example, a multiport Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) application can use a bus A to support very bursty but short traffic requests while a bus B uses 64-bit, long linear requests. A monolithic block optimized for bus A will not perform as well with bus B. What is desired is a reusable multiport slave peripheral architecture where an arbitration functional can be scaled to meet a wide number of bus interfaces to any one or more different bus designs and peripheral designs.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention concerns a circuit generally comprising an interface circuit and an arbitration circuit. The interface circuit may be couplable between a peripheral device and a plurality of ports. The arbitration circuit may be coupled to the interface circuit. The arbitration circuit may be configured to (i) store a plurality of associations between a plurality of time slots and the ports, (ii) check the associations in a subset comprising at least two of the time slots in response to receiving an arbitration request from a first requesting port of the ports, and (iii) generate a grant for the first requesting port to communicate with the peripheral device in response to the first requesting port matching at least one of the associations in the subset.
The objects, features and advantages of the present invention include providing arbitration functionability within a multiport advanced micro-controller bus architecture (AMBA) slave device that may provide (i) a variable number of ports, (ii) different port types, (iii) different peripheral types, (iv) a user definable arbitration priority for each port, (v) compile time selection of a number of ports, (vi) compile time selection of a datapath width, (vii) programmable time slots, (viii) multiple time slot look-ahead in a time slot wheel to determine a grant, (ix) a fixed priority arbitration when no port in the time slot wheel may be requesting, (x) following an AMBA design methodology, (xi) reuse of basic building blocks in different applications and/or (xii) reduced development costs compared with custom designs.


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“AMBA™ Specification” (Rev. 2.0), May 13, 1999, 230 pages.

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